Honorable Burial at Last for Makin Atoll Heroes / Marines' remains left behind in '42 are found

Three of the men were from Northern California, and all of them, the Marines say, were heroes.

The three were Capt. Gerald Holtom, an intelligence officer who went to college in Berkeley and lived in Palo Alto, Cpl. Robert Pearson, an infantryman from Lafayette, and Cpl. I. B. Earles of the San Joaquin Valley town of Tulare.

The remains of Sgt. Clyde Thompson, of Atlanta, the first enlisted Marine to win the Medal of Honor, were among those recovered.

They were killed in a raid on the Japanese-held Makin atoll in the Gilbert Islands in the summer of 1942. It was a daring operation, conducted in great secrecy 2,000 miles behind enemy lines. The leader was the lean, leathery and tough as nails Lt. Col. Evans Carlson. His right-hand man was Maj. James Roosevelt, son of the president of the United States.

The raid electrified the country: It was hailed as the first successful Allied ground attack against the Axis. The Raiders' motto "Gung Ho!" -- a Chinese expression meaning "work together" -- became part of the American vocabulary. There was even a hit movie, with Randolph Scott playing Carlson.

Yet the Makin raid was a victory that never was, a muddled and confused affair in which the Americans nearly surrendered to a defeated enemy. The raid also alerted the Japanese enemy to American capabilities, and the Japanese took vigorous countermeasures with serious and bloody consequences.

"This thing was a real screwup, a mess," said Ben Carson, a retired Forest Service officer who was a private in the raid. Worse, the raiders left behind 19 of their dead comrades and nine living Marines.

"Marines never forget their dead. Marines never leave their dead," said Jack Dornan of the Marine Raider Association, which is composed of veterans of the raiders, the elite of the elite corps.

The nine Marines left behind were captured, taken to Kwajalein Island and beheaded.

"This thing has been haunting me and many others for years," said Graydon Harn, who along with Carson led attempts to find the graves of the 19 dead Marines on Makin and have them returned to the United States.

BREAKTHROUGH TO UNCOVER REMAINS

It was a long and difficult battle. The Defense Department had searched for the bodies in 1948 but found nothing. Years later, Harn and Carson, backed by their comrades in the Marine Raiders Association, began pressuring the Pentagon, writing their representatives in Congress and using computers to broaden the scope of their work.

"I could not have done it without the help of Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse, " Carson said. Furse, a Democrat from Oregon, represented the district near the Republican Carson's home in Hillsboro, near Portland.

"I could not have done it without the computer," said Harn, who got a computer as a gift from his family. He went to work sending e-mails all over the world, especially to the island of Butaritari, which is part of the Makin atoll, a tiny slice of the independent nation of Kiribati.

The Marine Raiders put pressure on the Pentagon's POW/MIA office, which has been working on identifying military remains in Vietnam.

A forensic anthropologist and his team went to the island in 1998 and got a huge break when an 82-year-old islander named Bureimoa Tokarei came forward to say he had buried the men when he was a boy of 16 and knew the location.

The remains, including dogtags and bits of uniform, were removed later, taken to the armed services forensic lab in Hawaii, where, using DNA and dental records, 19 men were positively identified last month.

The memory of those Marines was strong on Makin; when a U.S. Marine honor guard went to the island last winter to move the remains to the United States, Bureimoa Tokarei, who does not speak English, came to attention and began to sing the Marine Corps anthem. "He sang it completely," Harn said. "The whole thing. He knew more verses than I did."

ELITE FIGHTING FORCE

The pull of tradition and valor was very much part of Carlson and his raiders. The Raiders were an elite unit specializing in guerrilla tactics. They existed only for two years; then they became part of Marine legend.

Carlson was the son of a preacher, a professional officer who had served in the Army in World War I, later joined the Marines as a private, became an officer, served in China and won the Navy Cross in Nicaragua in the 1930s.

He also made powerful friends: while assigned to the Presidential Security Detail at the "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Ga., he was noticed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Carlson went back to China and studied the guerrilla methods used by Mao Tse Tung and his communist army. He also took note of their "Gung Ho" spirit. Carlson wrote regular reports for the eyes of the president only.

When America entered the war, Roosevelt was being pressured by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to form a small, elite force along the lines of the British commandos. Carlson also was friendly with James Roosevelt, then a Marine reserve officer. He got the job, and two battalions of raiders -- called "Carlson's Raiders" by the troops -- were formed. Carlson made the younger Roosevelt his executive officer.

Their first mission was a surprise raid on the obscure Makin Atoll. The purpose was to divert the Japanese from the real attack on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, capture documents and knock the Japanese off balance.

The Raiders, handpicked and led by Carlson himself, trained in amphibious war near Honolulu. But while Carlson was long on bravery and theory, he was short on detail.

SUB-PAR TRAINING

Carson remembers that though the men were to make the assault from submarines, they never trained on subs and had never even been on a sub before.

Nonetheless, in early August, they sailed from Pearl Harbor aboard two old submarines, the Nautilus and the Argonaut.

But when they got to Makin, huge seas were running. "It was just a hellacious storm," he said, "The waves must have been 20 feet high."

They had a terrible time launching the rubber boats. In fact, they had never launched boats from a submarine. Many of the boats were swamped. They lost a lot of equipment, a lot of ammunition.

The Marines -- there were 13 officers and 208 enlisted men -- got ashore before dawn when it was "as dark as the inside of a black cow," Carson said. The idea was to surprise the sleeping Japanese garrison.

But one Marine accidentally fired his rifle, a sound that would wake the dead, and the Japanese boiled out of their barracks.

It was the Raiders' first fight, and it was fierce. "I remember the heroism, " Carson said. "We were seeing that for the first time. There was the heroism of those men."

The Japanese were outnumbered, but the Raiders didn't know that. The enemy made several terrifying Banzai charges, attacks that sent most soldiers running, but not the Marines.

The Japanese also employed snipers in the trees. It was a sniper who killed Capt. Holtom, the only officer to die. "He was buried near where he fell," Carlson wrote the family later. "He died like a man and a true patriot."

The battle for Makin was desperate and confusing. The Marines ran short of ammunition, and at one point, Carlson thought the Raiders had lost and wanted to surrender. The Marines sent a note to the enemy by a Japanese messenger, but in the confusion the messenger was shot and killed.

LAND OF CONFUSION

By the next morning, it turned out that the Japanese were all dead. The Marines had won. But they were disorganized.

Some of them, without much direction, made their way back to the submarines.

It was a terrible mess. Even the outboard motors didn't work, and neither did the radios. The men had to paddle out to sea, hoping to spot the submarines.

They hadn't intended to hold the island anyway. But when they counted heads,

four Marines were missing, left behind.

Five men volunteered to go back to try to find the missing men. "We were back in the safety of that boat," Carson said, "and they went back for their buddies."

But Japanese planes had been alerted and flew over Makin and dropped bombs. The submarines dived, and when they surfaced, there was no sign of any Marines.

The submarines couldn't wait. The element of surprise was gone and they couldn't stay in enemy waters. So they headed back for Pearl Harbor. They received a hero's welcome, and Adm. Chester Nimitz himself was there to meet the Raiders. It was a famous victory.

DESERTED ON AN ISLAND

On Makin, the lost Marines held out for a while, but they were alone, thousands of miles from friendly forces. They surrendered, and were killed by their captors on Kwajalein.

The fate of those men still haunts the Marines. Old men now, but still proud. "There is one thing you learn in the Marine Corps," said Harn, who is 78 and in poor health. "There are feelings that last all your life. We became like brothers. Like brothers."

Sixteen of the men from Makin will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery,

including all that is mortal of Holtum, the intelligence officer from Palo Alto, and Pearson, the infantryman from Lafayette. Earles will be buried next to his father and mother in Tulare.

There will be a ceremony at Arlington Aug. 19, the 59th anniversary of the day they died.

The remains of the nine Marines executed on Kwajalein have never been recovered. They are still there, like a memory that will not fade away.